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Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Digital Citizenship Meets Global Collaboration

This year, Susan Shaw's IS GATE RLA class is taking part in a global, hands-on digital citizenship project called theDigitween Project. They are collaborating with peers in other places such as China and the US, to research different aspects of digital citizenship and create a project.

Students' collaboration skills are stretched as they work with teammates in other countries to complete their research and share it with their classmates.To communicate with their partners they are using a wiki and Edmodo, a social media site.

Part of the project has classes connecting regularly via the web conferencing platform Elluminate. Recently our SAS Digitweens took it a step further. Up until then, our students had only web conferenced with their Chinese colleagues since the time zone difference made connecting with their US partners difficult.

Last Friday, Susan Shaw coordinated a Skype conference call with their US partner class. A number of the GATE students were able to be part of the conference call from home. They stayed up late and waited eagerly at their computers to be added to the conference call.

The conference started with introductions. Next students used the opportunity to talk with their research partners regarding the work they are doing. Once the work was out of the way, the conversation turned to daily life. The US students could not fathom the idea of a school so larger that there are 13 sections at each grade level. A number of our students have never seen snow and were enthralled to hear about the weather their partners were experiencing that day.

The conference call was such a success that the US students are hoping to get the chance to be the ones to stay up late and host the next conference call.

This meaningful and engaging project covers aspects of all six strands of our SAS Technology Framework:

Creativity and Innovation

Communication and Collaboration

Research and Information Fluency

Critical Thinking, Problem-Solving and Decision-Making

Digital Citizenship

Technology Operations and Concepts

If you have questions about this project please contact the IS GATE coordinator, Susan Shaw.